


there’s an albatross around your neck

by The-Immortal-Moon (LunaKat)



Series: 2019 New Year's Resolution (Year of Bastille) [4]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Father-Daughter Relationship, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Post-Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2020-01-04 20:31:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18351170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaKat/pseuds/The-Immortal-Moon
Summary: It is best to move forward, after all. Looking back gets you nothing. / It is the nature of tragedy to stalk your heels, but that doesn’t mean you can’t kick it back.





	there’s an albatross around your neck

**Author's Note:**

> AU. Proudly, shamelessly, ignores CoS.

**i. though it’s soaring still above your head**

 

Gabriel Elric is the youngest of four, the only brother to three sisters, and he thinks that makes him his father’s favorite.

There is not a soul Gabriel has met yet who has not made comparisons between him and his father, who has not called him his father’s spitting image. Same brown-blond hair, same hazel eyes, same rounded face. Dad’s old friends share secret smiles with one another when they make these comparisons, titter approvingly amongst themselves. And there is something else there, a shadow flitting between eyes, like there is something more they are not saying. But it makes them proud, this unspoken thing, even as it brings them to a brink he is too young to understand.

There is more to the similarities than just looks. Gabriel is exceptionally clever, and observant, and he reads between the beats of silence that punctuate conversations as much as conversations themselves. From these he learns of the loss, the grief, the absence—the things Dad never talks about and carries with the grace of someone who doesn’t know how to let go. It bends his great shoulders like a yoke upon an ox, tethers him to a burden that none can see and he lugs it throughout the day, through every waking moment.

There’s something similar in the way Dad’s old friends hold themselves, but only Dad finds his back breaking beneath it.

In the silence and the weight, Gabriel finds questions. In the stories, he finds answers.

Dad’s favorite story—Gabriel’s favorite story—is the one about the boy in the red coat. The young alchemist, the daring hero, the boy with a golden braid and a cutting smirk and blazing saffron eyes. And steel limbs, an arm and a leg, from where he reached for a piece of the Sun and was incinerated in the process. He could bend the world with just a clap of his hands and a crackle at his fingertips, and he was more brilliant than the universe distilled into the shape of someone too young to carry it all.

He was accompanied by a clanking suit of armor, a lost soul encapsulated in steel and anchored to an otherwise inert form. It did nothing to sway his kind heart, though, and this armored suit would follow the alchemist to the ends of the earth, if that was what became necessary. They were inseparable, these two entities. Unbreakable.

Dad always pauses on that part, always emphasizes it. Like it means something much more than it does.

And Gabriel reads between the spaces, as he has learned to do.

They went on adventures together, the armor and the alchemist. Paved a road together with alchemy and danger and triumph, with acts of daring and heroics and laughing in the face of adversity as though it were but a trifle. Saving people, thwarting villains, pulling people back from the brink of despair. The kind of excitement that grabs you by the heartstrings and tugs you in for more.

Actually—to call it just one story is perhaps too much, for it is a string of stories wrapped in a single narrative. It is more a chronicle, an epic masquerading as a bedtime story. Gabriel drinks it in like a thirsty desert flower.

His sisters don’t appreciate the chronicle. They prefer tales about princesses, about knights defeating dragons, about girls in towers spinning straw into gold. They don’t seem to understand how hollow those words are in comparison to this living fantasy. They don’t seem to notice how Dad waxes poetic about the boy in the red coat, who loses his temper when he’s called short and hates getting shots and cheats at cards on train rides.

They don’t seem how to notice how Dad talks about him like something lived and breathed and was irrevocably lost.

They don’t seem to notice that Dad has to take long pauses in the middle of the story, to take a deep breath and press his palms over his eyes and then smile gingerly as though in apology.

Or maybe his sisters do notice—the pauses, at least. They don’t like that the story is stilted and stuttering, that it is broken in places and missing pieces of a greater puzzle. They don’t read the pauses, though, or peer into the gaps with an analytical eye. They ask for a story that won’t bring their father to the edge of sorrow and don’t understand there is just as much joy to be found there as well.

~

“You should write this down,” Gabriel said to his father once.

Dad smiled sadly and said, “I don’t think he would forgive me if I did.”

~

Old Lady Pinako dies when Gabriel is young, so very young that he doesn’t remember much of the event. It is all a blur of dark clothes and Aunt Winry crying and Dad bowing his head and Mom telling him to tilt his head down in the same manner because it’s respectful. His sisters are all older, knew the woman better than Gabriel did, so they can better navigate the funeral than he can. At the wake, he instead finds himself quickly growing bored and toddling around aimlessly, snatching up whatever appetizers from the buffet table come within his grasp.

Finally, he comes across Dad sitting in a guest room in the house, absently running his hands over the pictures pinned to a corkboard that Gabriel is too short to make out properly, with misty eyes and a wistful expression that abates quickly upon Gabriel’s arrival. The smile Dad forces is touched by melancholy, and he asks what Gabriel is doing away from everyone else. Gabriel turns the question back at him.

“Remembering,” is the answer Dad gives him, enigmatic and raw and unabashed honesty.

It is there they have the dreaded talk on death and departing, on the afterlife and the conditional existence of one, where people go when they die and why they have to die at all. At this point, Gabriel is somewhere between three and four, at an age where most adults would come up with quick-fix answers that brush away the questions and replace them with saccharine reassurances to quails fears of an enormity that not even the adult mind can comprehend. But because they are both smart and because Dad is wistful, their discussion is heartfelt and deep, nebulous with its lack of definitive answers, composed of speculations that offer little satisfaction. It is heartwrenching in a way that it will take Gabriel years to understand.

Later, when they emerge, Dad as close to sullen as Gabriel has ever seen him and Gabriel buzzing with questions that were only half-answered, his mother scolds him for bringing up such a sensitive subject. Gabriel asks what she means, but she avoids the topic.

For a few days afterwards, Dad visits the graveyard with increasing frequency. He becomes something of a shadow in their house, only pausing to become substantial when Gabriel inquires about such heavy matters as death and loss. Even though the answers never grow more definitive, Gabriel keeps asking and asking until his mother makes him stop.

Then, abruptly, the visits to the graveyard cease. It’s a crisp morning in early October, Gabriel remembers, but it will be years before this fact becomes significant.

~

When Gabriel is nine, he gets into alchemy. His father is his teacher, helps him trace out designs in chalk and circles, helps him transform the world into whatever it is he desires. None of his sisters are very interested themselves, see nothing glamorous in reading numerous books on end detailing such obscure subjects. And they do not understand what it means for knowledge to become part of your very being and to tie yourself so irreparably to the science that living and breathing without it is impossible.

They don’t understand that’s only half of the intoxication—the rest comes from watching the various shades and tints of nostalgia flicker across Dad’s face, watching with bated breath for the next hint, the next clue.

One of his sisters makes a nasty comment about alchemy, and he, with an uncharacteristically righteous indignation, fights her in an all-out brawl that leaves him with bruised knuckles and her with a skinned knee. Dad has to tear them away, a sharply worded scolding delivered to the both of them. To Gabriel, he says not to be so rash and violent. To his sister, that she should be looking out for her little brother instead of picking fights.

There’s something about the way Dad says both those things that makes Gabriel remember them. “Little brother,” Dad said, with the strangest tone of voice. Little brother, little brother.

_Little brother._

The first pieces of the puzzle begin to connect.

~

Gabriel is twelve and is helping Aunt Winry clean out her attic when he finds it—tucked in a boxed, folded with loving care, smelling of cardboard and mildew and the mustiness of age.

The cloth is not in good condition. There must have been something in the dye, or in the box, that made the color fade in places. Something that has dimmed it despite it having not been exposed to the elements for so long. But the black Flamel crown stitched into the back remains vibrant and striking, probably even more so than when the scarlet color was new.

He runs his hands over the fleece, the fabric whispering beneath his fingertips, and tries to imagine it is the breathing of a person he will never know, never meet. Aunt Winry finds him holding it and she says nothing, but the look in her eye says everything and even then, Gabriel has always been good at reading the silences.

She helps him fold the coat back up carefully, tuck it away before Dad can see. Once the box has been closed up, she smiles at him, and it is the same smile she and all the other of Dad’s old friends have.

Only then does Gabriel realize it is mourning in their gazes, that flitting shadow, and that it is not so much a secret as is something they choose not revisit.

It is best to move forward, after all. Looking back gets you nothing.

~

It is the night of the premier, the long-awaited movie that has been advertised for months and months and months. Gabriel is sixteen when it finally hits the theaters, when the reels of film are first loaded into the projectors and the curtains are peeled back for the silver screen. A white vellum card was sent in the mail a week before then, along with tickets to an advance screening that Dad ultimately declined. Instead, they choose to attend the premier, just like everyone else.

He sits between his father and Aunt Winry, who look far grimmer than any of the other spectators, as though they are braced for tragedy rather a tribute.

The reel starts, and the pictures flicker to life. It’s not quite the story as Gabriel remembers it—they honed in on a particularly spectacular adventure, one of Gabriel’s favorites growing up—but it is beautiful regardless. Everything about it is lovingly crafted, from the dynamic shots to the special effects to the way the actors lose themselves in the roles. For a moment, he even forgets himself that this is a story he knows too well, and in that brief space between immersion and reality, he forgets that he already knows the ending.

As the credits start to roll, he looks over and finds his father with a hand pressed to her mouth and shining tear streaks painted down his face.

Gabriel reaches out and clasps his hand in his. He finally thinks he understands.

~

As they leave the theater, Dad laughs a little too loudly, a little too sharply. “God, he would have  _hated_  that.”

It is dark, edging close to a dreary midnight, and the sky full of stars high overhead makes as though to crush them beneath its enormity. Gabriel has always liked the night sky in the country, preferred it to the blare of the city lights, but now he cannot look up without wondering. Pondering. Thinking about what ifs and would could have beens and questions that can offer only nebulous answers in exchange. Nothing that will pop sutures into place where they are so desperately needed.

“Too clean-cut,” Aunt Winry agrees, drawing her jacket tighter. “And the actor dressed more tastefully—he would probably hunt down the costume designer and yell at them for ‘dressing down his character’ or something equally ridiculous.”

Again, Dad laughs, but Gabriel notes the sharp pitch, the jagged cut of it, how it is just this side of off and there is an undercurrent that stalks the sound relentlessly, clings to it like a shadow. The way it sounds almost like sobbing in the right light. Just hearing it makes something in Gabriel hurt a little. And if Aunt Winry notices, she chooses not to comment on it.

She bids them goodnight, and they start making their way back home. Their car is parked on the curb, and they move with a hastiness as though the theater itself is cursed, as though tragedy will strike again if they do not put as much distance between it and them as possible. But then they are inside, and the ignition won’t start, and though Dad never curses, the look in his eyes says he has no patience for the delay as he turns the key again and again and again. Even when the ignition starts, though, Dad doesn’t seem to notice, just keeps turning the key.

Silent, Gabriel sits there and watches his father, this man who is trapped in the aftermath of something far too big for him to even begin comprehending. “Dad?” he asks, and what he really means is  _Is there anything I can do to ease your pain?_.

There is pause, then a sigh, and Dad places both hands firmly on the wheel and now would be the perfect moment to let the burden fall away.

Then, tentatively, he cracks a smile. “It was pretty good, as far as pictures go, huh?”

~

The next day, Gabriel goes to the florists and purchases a banquet of yellow lilies, which he asks specifically to be wrapped in red tissue paper. It throws the florist off, this request, but she complies, and soon the golden blossoms are bound up in bright scarlet.

He cradles them as he would a child, a precious life. One that he will never know.

In all the years that Gabriel has lived in Risembool, he has never visited the cemetery. It seems like such a shocking revelation in hindsight, that he has never set foot in the stone garden of dead souls—especially with the tragedy that stalks his father’s half of the family.

He arrives at the cemetery early in the morning but it is well after noon when he finally stumbles across the headstone he seeks. It’s a plain thing, the stone neither cheap nor overly expensive, the letters cut cleanly into the surface with the greatest of care. Grass is poking through where the earth was parted to bury an empty coffin, because there never was a body found. His mother tells him that it wasn’t until years and years after the initial disappearance that a funeral was even held in the first place, like everyone had just given up pretending to hope, finally setting aside this thing they clung to for so long in place of a bleak and burdening acceptance.

 _1899-1915_ , read the printed letters. Sixteen years. That’s how old Gabriel is now.

Slowly, and with great care, Gabriel lowers himself to his knees and sets the flowers atop the soil. He can imagine Dad doing the same—he has yet to find a soul that has not called him his father’s spitting image.

“Hey Uncle Ed,” Gabriel says. “Did you know they made a movie about you?”

 

* * *

* * *

* * *

 

**ii. it is out of sight and none shall see**

 

Johanna Elric is the youngest of four, with three older siblings she has never met, and is all her father has left of to love.

Her family is a small one, consisting of just herself and her father and the cat he reluctantly allowed her to adopt off the streets as a kitten. What mother she had was lost to complications of childbirth, and her mother’s brother only ever seems to care about Johanna when he suddenly remembers her existence and tries to wrest her away from her father’s protection. As such, there is not much she knows about her mother’s side of the family, which is just as much as she cares to know.

It’s more than she knows about her father’s, though.

She knows her father as someone who says things when he means something else, who withholds answers and speaks in riddles without even realizing he’s doing it. Crypticity and secrets are within his nature, for the truth has reaped too much from him to be trusted anymore. So she learns to turn over his responses in her head and pick them apart from different angles until she finds an interpretation that best suits her needs.

From this she learns that Papa had a brother to him who he “can never see again”—he never says “dead”, explicitly, as though he himself is uncertain, but he makes it clear that any attempts to contact him are futile, so it is best to just treat him as though he were. From this she learns that the accident that stole his arm and leg was not industrial, despite that being the story he is inclined to share, and that he knows the creator of his prostheses personally but lost contact with her long ago. From this she learns that the second World War took more pieces of him than he is willing to admit.

She learns that he was broken long before then.

~

They say she’s her father’s daughter, and they are right. She has his saffron-colored eyes, the same complexion, a similar structure to her face. Even his compact frame and broad shoulders have been passed to her. Her mother’s freckles and auburn hair conspire to eclipse this likeness, but it cannot eclipse the way their mannerisms synchronize, the way they both lose their tempers in matching explosions and laugh to the same pitch and even smirk in the same shape.

People call her brilliant, just like him, and Papa is the greatest offender. He rarely smiles, but when he does, he smiles for her like condensed starlight.

He says she’ll shine, says she’ll fly so high she won’t even know what do with it. He tells her to just make sure she doesn’t get herself burned trying to grasp the sun.

Sometimes she catches Papa drinking his  _jenever_  in the late hours and wonders to herself if she, too, will be a burnt-out husk when she has reached his age.

This is not something she holds against him. Loss strips you down and forms callouses upon your soul, and no one knows loss more than her father. Papa’s whole family was stolen by the first World War—that is not what he  _says_ , but she thinks it’s what he _means_ when he says they were taken by “senseless tragedy”—and then the second one ripped the wound raw again. She dissects the things he says and not-says and deduces that his first wife fell victim to the SS in some manner too gruesome to speak of, that the two brothers and one sister she will never meet were lost somewhere to the concentration camps. That the brother he loves more than life itself was gone long before then, and that whatever stole him away is something he holds himself personally accountable for. That every day he is crippled by the inexorable knowledge that they should still be here, and it kills him that all she has to know them by is a handful of photographs he managed to escape with.

She knows through him that guilt is not a thing you can erase by merely wishing it away.

That is all behind them now. You can’t ask a ghost not to haunt you anymore than you can ask wolves not to hunt and birds not to fly. It is the nature of tragedy to stalk your heels, but that doesn’t mean you can’t kick it back. And damn if he doesn’t try.

Papa is a proud man, and one who struggles to put thoughts into words. He is a mathematician, a chemist, a scientist—not a poet. What he feels he expresses through action alone, through little gestures and big gestures alike, through hugging her when she has nightmares and making tea for her when she’s had a bad day and telling her stories about the boy in the red coat.

He’s not a storyteller, so they are not epic tales, nothing flowery or romantic about them. They are curt and short, but profound. Simple on the surface with great layers brimming beneath. Inspirational, though he doesn’t seem to realize it. Anecdotes that you can string together into a narrative, a chronicle.

He becomes offended when she begins documenting them, and it is here that she learns how personal they are to him. It takes at least twenty promises to never turn the stories over to a publisher before he goes back to sharing them.

~

“Have you ever thought about going home, Papa?” she asked her father once, because she knew he was not from Holland.

Papa clucked his tongue and said, “I can’t think of a time when I’ve ever stopped.”

~

Papa never explicitly says he loves Johanna in the way he never explicitly says lots of things, but rather leaves them hanging and hinging on his actions. If she were less clever, did not recognize this for what it was—the inability to wring something meaningful and profoundly loving from a heart too battered to be capable of it anymore—she would probably be bitter over it.

As it is, it just saddens her.

Often, she turns to the photographs of her long-dead half-siblings and imagines, sometimes, she can converse with them. Which is silly, because they probably wouldn’t even speak Dutch. German, probably, like Papa—she wonders if they would have had the same unusual accent, the same propensity for collecting books with strange symbols and hoarding them in the study and if they, like Papa, would obsess over them until they fell asleep at their desks.

Perhaps they were born in the other place, the one Papa not-talks about, the home that is not Germany—not from the way he talks about Germany, or London, or Holland, and not from the way he not-talks about this lost home—and if they, too, peered out the window with sorrowful, wistful looks.

She wonders if Papa ever told them about his brother, if he ever talked to them about this person Johanna will never meet.

There’s a good chance he did, probably dropped the occasional mention or wistful recollection, rather than bide his silence in sorrow and gloom as he does now. He was younger then, and these siblings of hers knew him before he was so heavily steeped in bitterness, and they had him more completely than she ever will. Sometimes she wonders if it was intentional, their taking pieces of his heart with them so that she, Johanna, would be left with a hollow likeness. Some last, spiteful urge before they left this world.

He probably told them he loved them, in words rather than roundabout riddles and gestures, before the phrase left a too-painful burn scar upon his tongue. He was singed back then, she knows from the photos, but she arrived after he was blackened by their loss and even if he loves her as much as his scarred heart is capable of it, the words will never leave his lips. There is too much fear of the world’s retaliation to admit he cares.

It is with great effort that Johanna does not hate the world for embittering him so, for crippling his heart. With even more effort she does not hate the afterimages left by her siblings for doing the same.

But it is good there are no photographs of her long-lost uncle, because Johanna does not think she would be strong enough not to resent him.

~

Johanna never really becomes fluent in German or English, no matter how much Papa tries to teach her. She learns to read English and to understand German, but cannot hold a conversation in either.

The first two words of German she learns are “heimweh” and “fernweh”—the first means homesickness, and the second describes a desire to be anywhere but where you are.

It is not a coincidence that these are the words Papa teaches to her.

~

It takes a while before Johanna begins connecting the pieces, longer before she tries to string them together.

She consults twelve atlases, five maps, four encyclopedias, and calls up eight libraries, but none of them have anything on “Risembool” or “Amestris” or half the places he names in his tales.

He scolds her later for the mess she makes of the study in the ensuing tantrum, and she fires off something about him being a cryptic midget and they yell about it for an hour or two before she storms into her room and slams the door behind her.

Papa is a scientist, not a poet, and his imagination is not of the narrative variety. The boy in the red coat, the clanking armor, the pyromaniac colonel, the Amazonian housewife—they are embellishments in a grander and grimmer tale that he keeps close to his chest, lost among the folds of grief and sorrow that now make up his heart.

If only she could understand what the allegory is supposed to represent. What he is, without words, trying to tell her.

~

When Johanna is sixteen and the same age as him when he first lost the home he never speaks of, she reads a translated version of a very popular American novel. Her teacher is the one who recommends it, even though it is technically a children’s book, because she thought Johanna might find the themes appealing.

It is not the teacher’s fault Johanna collapses into tears once she’s done reading the book. The teacher knew nothing of Papa’s yearning looks and bouts of wistful depression, knew nothing of the way Papa talked of the world as though it were purgatory or a dream or both. There was no way the teacher could have known she would lock herself in her room for two days with her cat, sobbing into the poor feline’s fur, until Papa transitioned from banging on the door to gently entreating her to please come out, please talk to him, he’ll listen and she knows he will—but  _she_  wants to be the one listening, for once.

On the third day, she relents and unlocks the door. But only after she leaves the rented Dutch copy of _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_  at her bedside table, where he glances at it uneasily as he walks in and even if he’s never read it, he’s smart enough to put two and two together. And she knows this because she’s smart enough, too.

They sit together on the bed, and she has her knees curled to her chest and her arms wrapped around them and there is a lump in her throat, but she’s stubborn and proud and willful just like him and  _won’t_  let herself cry. “What was his name?”

And he’s old, and she’s tired, and he does not insult her intelligence by asking who. “Alphonse.”

Her hands clench fists around her pantlegs. “That’s a nice name.”

Rather than say anything, he throws an arm around her shoulders and pulls her close.

“I wish I could have met him,” she murmurs.

“He would have loved you,” he replies. She can’t see his face, but she knows from the roughness of his voice that he is crying—not with tears, not really, she has never seen him shed tears. There is a difference between shedding tears and letting the hurt seep through your heart, but it is crying nonetheless.

She leans her head against his shoulder and—if she allowed herself to cry—she can’t decide, just then, if it would be for the family they’ve lost or for just him, or even for herself for never knowing any of them.

~

Johanna takes the story—the multitudes of stories, of anecdotes and offhanded comments, the little things he says and not-says, the things he laughs at and the things that make him grimly silent—and clips away the fantastic elements and detangles the complicated knots and then presents it to him in a stack of freshly-printed paper.

“Can I publish  _this_?” she asks once he is done reading.

With a snort, he sets the manuscript aside. He handles it with his prosthetic hand, and she knows without his saying that he dislikes it, even before he growls, “It’s not the truth.”

“Then what is?”

She is unsurprised when he doesn’t answer. He rarely ever gives her a straight answer.

“You don’t tell me the truth,” she says, not without patience and affection and the utmost love of a daughter for her father, but also not without the anger and frustration of someone who has grown up with a man who cannot leave the past behind him, “so I have to make my own.”

His eyes narrow, and he opens his mouth as if to fire off a retort—only to pause, suddenly uncertain, his gaze wavering for the first time she has ever seen. For a fraction of a moment, she hopes against all hope that is getting ready to confide in her. That he will finally expunge the guilt and the sorrow from his being, that he will relinquish his burden in favor of fully embracing the reality they both face. That the past will fall away from his shoulders like a too-heavy coat and once he is free of the dream, he will  _finally_  wrap his arms around her, like she has always wished.

But she knows better, is smarter than he ever gives her credit for. She learned long ago that he is a man trapped between fantasy and reality and so she is not overly disappointed when all he grunts out is, “Fine.”

As she gathers up the manuscript, the false narrative, he adds, softer this time, “You’re brilliant writer.”

She pauses. The finished product is far more polished and poetic and descriptive than his version ever was. She had to breathe life into the story—but it is not even hers to tell.

“I won’t publish it,” she tells him.

He shakes his head. “No. Publish it. It would be a damn shame if it ended up abandoned in a box somewhere.”

Silent, she clutches their shared masterpiece to her chest and stares at her father, this man she knows so well and yet hardly knows at all. “Papa,” she says, and what she really means is  _I’m sorry I can’t free you from your burden_.

There is a pause, then a sigh, and Papa places his hands flat on his knees and now would be a wonderful, beautiful time to tell her he loves her.

Then, suddenly, he cracks a smile. “Just don’t let them make it into a movie, okay?”

**Author's Note:**

> Title and part titles come from the lyrics of "Weight of Living Part I" by Bastille (Album: All This Bad Blood).
> 
> Yeah, I know. Four consecutive fics with titles inspired by Bastille song lyrics. But in my defense, Bastille lyrics are so poetic that it is very easy to title fics after them.
> 
> ...I know. I'm a mess.


End file.
